Jefferson Journal

JAN | FEB 2018

The Jefferson Journal is JPR's members' magazine featuring articles, columns, and reviews about living in Southern Oregon and Northern California, as well as articles about finance, health and food from NPR. The magazine also includes program listings for JPR's network of radio stations. The publication's bi-monthly circulation is approximately 10,000. To support JPR and receive your copy in the mail each month become a Member today!

Like the Syrah grape leaves that wrap a wheel of Rogue River Blue cheese, our taste buds, leaf-shaped on the tongue, wrap around the cheese as we put it in our mouths. Then, like the judges at the 2012 World Cheese Awards, who rated Rogue River Blue one of the sixteen best cheeses in the world, we might say we could “sense the cows and the grass in the cheese.” One of the best tastes my tongue ever wrapped around was fresh goat’s milk in the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area, where I met a young couple backpacking with their herd of goats. I emptied my water bottle so they could fill it with milk, the freshest, most delicious milk I have ever tasted. I could sense in it the wildflowers and shrubs of the Trinities.

Editor's Note: April 2013 marked the 71st anniversary of the Bataan Death March. It ranks among the most significant atrocities in the recorded history of armed conflict and has become a widely memorialized event. Craig Faulkner, whom many readers will know as the host of JPR’s American Rhythm — The Gourmet Oldies Show, has agreed to share the story of his father’s journey of survival and renewal — from the Bataan Death March and the Hell Ships, through fear and hatred, to forgiveness and the dawn of illumined spiritual understanding.

Spring can really hang you up the most, you know? But that doesn't stop me from loving this season of growth, rebirth, rejuvenation, renewal, re-everything, and crazy, crazy weather. Oh how I love spring.

In a recent conversation with a JPR staff member I found myself in an interesting and spirited discussion about the difference between public radio and what he referred to as “corporate” radio. As I listened, I found myself struggling with the very concept of “corporate” anything. It seems to me that a corporation is a legal structure, not a qualitative standard. I generally accept the principle that there are effective corporations and ineffective corporations, just like there are effective non-profits and ineffective non-profits.

Running the day-to-day activities of a pretty complicated public radio network can be downright consuming. Each day, there are programs to produce, transmitters to fix and money to be raised. Through the buzz of daily work here at JPR, it’s sometimes easy to forget the part we play in a bigger public radio community. A recent email from NPR Senior Vice President for News, Margaret Low Smith, made me step back to put that bigger picture in focus and I thought I’d share portions of her communication with you.

You may find this hard to believe, but I did actually study music in my youth. It was the principal focus of my academic work until I was in my late teens, and I played first violin in the school orchestra. So significant was music in my life at that time that, when I set off for university, my parents believed that I was training to be a music teacher. I wasn't. I went to read English, and I have never played in an orchestra or lifted a violin in anger since.

At the dawn of the new year, the U.S. Congress approved and the President signed H.R. 8: The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 – averting the so-called “fiscal cliff.” What does this mean for public broadcasting and JPR? Since the legislation includes a two-month delay to sequestration, the mandatory cuts that would be imposed if no compromise could be reached, it delays the estimated 8.2% or $36 million cut to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that would have gone into effect on January 1 as a result of sequestration.

In November, NPR and the regional public radio organizations around the nation convened a meeting that I believe will be important in charting a course for the future of public radio. Much of the meeting focused on the sizzling pace of technological change taking place for consuming media content and how stations can and must adapt to providing content in this brave new world. There were three takeaways from the meeting:

It was a dark and drizzly night when we arrived about 15 minutes fashionably late at a friend’s house for a holiday party. Greeted, and coats taken away, the sounds of lively conversation and laugher filled the living room, but seeing that all the cushy seats were taken we headed into the kitchen. A large table in a window nook was filled with goodies and hors d’oeuvres reflecting colorfully in the glass...but then I spied the kitchen counter cluttered with numerous bottles of exotic liqueurs. Grabbing a couple of nibbles I walked toward the counter.

There are those who love Christmas. I am one of them. I love the Christmas tree with its special ornaments, the evergreen-scented wreaths, the bells, the carols, the lights. I love making pies and cookies, making presents, wrapping presents, and giving (and, yes, receiving) presents. It is all so much fun.

As sure as the leaves turn and the snap of winter returns to the State of Jefferson, comes JPR’s annual dance with the national public radio networks for rights to carry the national programs you hear each day on JPR. Each year I hope the conversation with NPR and the other national networks goes a little easier and makes more sense for JPR and its listeners. And, each year I leave these conversations sorely disappointed.

I’m writing this in Oregon’s high desert, on the shore of Summer Lake—or, to be more accurate, on the rim of its dry lakebed. It’s August, and I’m here with a group of artists, scientists, and writers, all of us gathered to think about the future of the northern Great Basin in the face of change—most fundamentally, climate change.

In the first Presidential debate of 2012, Governor Mitt Romney said that he would end federal funding for public broad­­casting.

Such a step would be a game changer for stations like JPR, which relies on federal support as a critical component of the diverse funding sources that enable us to serve our listeners. To be clear, federal funding amounts to about 13% of JPR’s annual budget. But, that amount is an absolutely essential element of our ability to operate, equaling roughly the amount we raise each year from both our fall and spring on-air membership drives.

In September of 1998 I waltzed into the basement offices of Jefferson Public Radio on the SOU campus in a silk dress and green platform clogs. I was a recent graduate of said university, with a degree in English and a desperate desire to write professionally. In the year since my graduation I’d participated in some pretty spectacular failures: rejection from six MFA programs, well over twenty letters of refusal from small presses, pinned to a bulletin board at home, and my life savings blown on a solo trip to Europe.

As members of the JPR Foundation board and Southern Oregon University leaders have been engaged in discussions during the past several weeks about how best to govern JPR, I’ve had an opportunity to reflect on the value of what we do each day and why it’s important. As I’ve listened to numerous stakeholders who care deeply about JPR’s service to the region convey their goals for our organization, it seems to me the essence of our mission and our work boils down to a few core concepts:

On October 31st 1947, two police cars collided at the intersection of 7th and H streets in Eureka, California. Both cars had their sirens going and were responding to a call. They didn’t hear each other and in a terrible second, several policemen were severely injured and one, an 18-year veteran of the Eureka Police Force, was killed. It was Halloween and my mother, Mary Lee Carroll, was at a dance at Humboldt State College when, sometime during the evening, her life was shattered when she received the news that her dad, Officer Pete Carroll was dead.

The dispute between the JPR Foundation (JPRF) and Southern Oregon University (SOU) over how JPR should be organized and governed has been front and center in recent weeks. The current status of the conflict is that a 90-day “cooling off period” has been brokered by Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber’s office during which a second round of mediation between the two parties will be conducted with the goal of finding common ground and developing solutions to the disagreement.

Except for casserole recipes, I don’t often look to the editors of Parade Magazine for inspiration. I thumb through it most Sundays as quickly as I can. I would ignore it altogether, but I can’t bear to waste any part of my newspaper. Come to think of it, that’s probably also why I find casseroles so satisfying. I admire new ways of using little bits of leftovers that otherwise would have gone to waste.